Agents in Electronic Commerce: Component Technologies for Automated Negotiation and Coalition Formation

Automated negotiation and coalition formation among self-interested agents are playing an increasingly important role in electronic commerce. Such agents cannot be coordinated by externally imposing their strategies. Instead the interaction protocols have to be designed so that each agent is motivated to follow the strategies that the protocol designer wants it to follow. This paper reviews six component technologies that we have developed for making such interactions less manipulable and more e cient in terms of the computational processes and the outcomes:

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICMAS
• Authors: Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: Coalition Formation, ICMAS 1998, Intelligent Agents, Self-interested Agents, Such Agents